We have had the privilege to work with clients over the past 25 years in the area of People and Performance. We typically work with Senior Leaders to understand their organisation objectives to develop their ‘People Capability Plan’ that provides a clear pathway and approach to uplifting capabilities to deliver to their organisation strategy.

Our primary aim as Learning and Development Leads and Practitioners  is to ensure People have the current and future skills to perform effectively in their role.  We also recognise that we should be one of the major contributors to effective strategy execution of an organisation’s objectives i.e. we are developing skills for a purpose which is about enabling performance to achieve a desired organisation outcome.

However, in our experience we have seen varying levels of success with organisations executing their strategy effectively despite giving it focus, allocating reasonable budgets and resourcing the initiative. Recognising that this can come down to a range of factors including unanticipated market and legislative changes, competitive pressures requiring strategy adjustments or re-focus, dependence on information accuracy flowing through multiple layers of management to the front line, disparate systems making it difficult to access timely information or execute processes, competing prioritises between organisation strategy and employee rewards and recognition, we still need to take accountability on whether as L&D professionals it’s enough for us to build and deliver on a People Capability Plan.

In other words, what problem are we trying to solve? An uplift in people skills or a capability uplift in performance to meet an organisation objective. One approach is very L&D specific and the other is an employee centric approach to which L&D may have a broader responsibility.

As Learning and Development practitioners is it OK to say we have done our job if employees in an organisation have access to the learning programs and experiences they need to lift their skills? If we provide access to learning library for self-service learning? If we offer leadership programs and events for continuing education? Is it enough?

This is the question came into focus for us after we delivered a solution for one of our key clients. It was an on-boarding program for front line teams that work in a highly complex sales and service environment. Employees needed to be fully accredited to provide advice to their customers, understand the legislative environment they operate in, provide product solutions to customers based on their needs and justify the reason for their recommendations, operate as business unit with aggressive sales targets all without breaching organisation policies and utilising internal systems that aren’t optimised for efficiency.

The solution provided was a 90-day blended program that included digital and face to face learning, in-field peer to peer learning, practical case studies, quick reference guides and system simulations. This was all designed by involving key stakeholders and being guided by a working committee to ensure content and learning experiences were timely and relevant.

We all felt great about the solution and our client were advocates.

Here was the problem.

We were focused on delivering an exceptional front-loaded L&D experience that takes the learner to a certain point in their learning and development journey and we then simply stopped just before we reach, what we feel is the stage that can deliver the most value,  focused on performance outcomes.

After learning, then development there is performance support. For complete clarity performance support includes all the tools and resources, communication, ongoing learning, and organisation processes required for a person to excel in their role or function. It goes beyond providing quick reference guides, micro-learning or links to sites to obtain more information at the point of need. This could possibly be called ‘learning in the flow of work’ and while this is useful, we needed to do better if our aim was focused on achieving performance outcomes.

We know that providing performance support as part of a broader learning and development strategy isn’t new, however how we devise solutions and practically implement them still remains a challenge for most organisations we have worked with. Maybe the reason is that building instructionally sound learning experiences or skills matrix is ‘in our control’ whereby trying to coordinate updates, alignment and easy accessibility to organisation processes, cut through communication and  knowledgebase bespoke to an individual to support for any new initiative is difficult and seems ‘out of our control’ as there are too many dependencies.

We now operate with the understanding that a comprehensive learning, development and performance support approach factors in three key stages of Acquire, Apply and Action and that it is an L&D responsibility to ensure that solutions are offered across each stage that are relevant and bespoke to the employee and their team.

Through our practical experience, there is always focus, effort, budget and campaigning for the formal aspect of learning ie. Acquire, with comprehensive in-field support  to help drive and embed change, stave off the forgetting curve and allow alignment of processes and technology to the change, coming second i.e Apply and providing an offering in the Action stage is typically considered out of scope for L&D. Even our attempts at providing quick reference tools for in-field support or updates via micro-learning for ongoing development falls short as they are typically geared toward development that occurs in the Apply stage.

This creates the ‘big bang’ theory of learning where there is a lot of energy and excitement as a project or new initiative is curated or built, to offer experiences in the Acquire and Apply stages.  Once the formal learning is implemented in whatever form it takes then we move into the next learning program to develop and deliver leaving a series of ‘training bursts’ as isolated events rather than a cohesive continuous learning and development program that is sufficiently embedded in work practices and contextualised within organisation objectives to ensure it’s stickiness.

We are unfortunately becoming a key driver for learning and development fatigue where learning programs are introduced and poorly embedded or supported and slowly over time disappear until the organisation problem is raised again years down the track. We are potentially encouraging an attitude amongst teams and leaders that if you wait long enough you will see the models, concepts, language of the latest learning program fad come and dissipate just as quickly.

Then we wonder why its hard at times to get a ‘seat at the table’ or be able to measure the effectiveness of learning and development and provide real tangible results and ROI.

Our ‘aha’ moment was that we need to tweak our approach and align to other organisation drivers if we are to make real impact.

We realised that we need to get better at delivering a learning and development experience with a strong emphasis on performance support that is employee centric.  This meant we had to get involved in understanding role definitions and how we leverage organisation processes, communication channels, internal knowledgebase, and discussion forums to provide performance support to an employee.  It didn’t mean we needed to build or own everything, but we certainly needed to have clarity on who was (we used the RACI model to assist with this).

We took on a learning and performance support approach to all consulting projects from that point onwards and we started to see some interesting outcomes.

We started with the end in mind and worked back. What would performance support look like for an employee and then worked on building or curating the tools and resources required. We worked with internal stakeholders that owned organisation processes, policies and tech stacks, as well as subject matter experts including representatives in our working group. We leveraged internal systems such learning managements systems, learning experience platforms, SharePoint, Teams and internal communication and engagement channels such as team meetings and conferences to build a comprehensive employee centric solution.

Our focus was on performance and achieving organisation goals. We were getting better solutions and outcomes and interestingly we were also seeing the opportunities to also improve employee wellbeing with better access to information, learning and support.